He was born June 4, 1923 in Warsaw, Poland and was a pupil at the Josef Pilsudski No.1 Cadet School in Lvov (now Lviv, Ukraine), when the war broke out. At age 16, he found himself being transported by train to Siberia from which he had to escape. After walking for three weeks, he made his way back to Lvov and then made his way to the UK via Bulgaria, Greece and France. Finishing his schooling in Scotland, he then joined the Polish Navy, eventually gaining the rank of Lieutenant Commander serving on destroyers and motor torpedo boats. He saw action in the Mediterranean, at the Dieppe and D-Day landings, as well as in the Battle of the Atlantic.

After the war, he graduated with a masters degree in agriculture from the University of Cambridge, England, and then took a posting as the head of an agricultural research station in Sierra Leone, Africa, where he worked for six years. On his return he bought a farm in Suffolk England where he farmed for 35 years and was a training officer for the Agricultural Training Board, working to increase the skills of farmers in the county through formalized training.

When the the Iron Curtain came down, he fulfilled an ambition to return to Poland where he farmed for another nine years before retiring to England.